r/audiobooks • u/shaggylocks • 6h ago
Question What are your AI narrator "tells?"
My son and I are currently listening to The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection on Spotify together, narrated by Oliver Thompson. I wanted to introduce him to Sherlock Holmes while we were on a long car trip this past winter, and this was one of the first (if not THE first) result that popped up when I searched for a Holmes audiobook on Spotify. Now we listen to it whenever we're in the car together, but we've both begun to suspect that Oliver Thompson is not a real person.
At first we thought the narrator just had some quirks. He did nothing to differentiate the voices of the different characters which made the story hard to follow at times, but I initially just chalked that up to the book being public domain and the narrator being an amateur. But then, as we went on, there was the occassional odd line reading. An emphasis on the wrong word. A character would plead for their life as if asking for directions. Phrases like "Hullo! Hullo! Hullo! What's this?"--where a normal human would like read it "hullo, hullo, hullo," said quickly, but Thompson reads it as if Holmes is shouting three different greetings to three different people. The audiobook was published in 2024: was this an artifical voice still on the edge of the uncanny valley, or was it just a guy reading 65 hours of Holmes stories on autopilot?
The idea that this could potentially be AI makes me angrier than I expected it to, particularly because, if it is in fact AI, there's no indication of such. The narrator has a normal human name: I want to listen to a normal human reading the story. I don't want to be giving money and exposure, however small it may be, to some tech bro who's dumping public domain works into an AI speech bot and publishing the results. By the time we started suspecting this narrator might be AI (which took me an embarrassingly long time, in retrospect) we were already something like 35 hours in an my son didn't want to switch to a different audiobook. We've made a game of shouting "AI!" whenever Oliver Thompson says something a little off, but each time we do that I get mad all over again at the enshittification of beloved things. Or, perhaps more specifically, the monetization of the enshittification of beloved things. Because even a flawless reading would be like consuming empty calories for the soul.
Oliver Thompson: if you're a real person, I apologize. But I really don't think you are.
I can only assume this is a growing issue in the audiobook space. I don't know if other people are as anti-AI narrator as I am, but I would like to avoid listening to another AI audiobook if I can help it. Do you have any tips or tricks for identifying AI narrators? Any publishing companies to avoid? Any obvious tells? Thank you.
EDITED TO ADD: There are good comments on what to listen for to identify AI (thank you!), but this post is also getting a lot of downvotes, so maybe those who support and those who oppose AI-narration are evenly split?